Neck Face banged a metal pipe on the side of a blacked-out doorway, jumping out at unsuspecting passers-by to shout, “Aaarrgh!” Banksy floated anonymously (or so went the rumor) around the perimeter of a room dominated by a huge cathedral window the graffiti artist had scrawled with spray paint. Skateboarders skidded off geometric ramps designed by Lance Mountain and Geoff McFetridge just inside the entrance of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA as an art mob filed in from a brisk evening and up a ramp into the enveloping graffiti world of Art in the Streets, the first major American museum exhibition devoted to street art, and a first for an occasionally controversial museum director making a debut.
It is just over a year since Jeffrey Deitch, a longtime New York gallery owner, was named director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and charged with rescuing an institution whose attendance had dwindled by 2009 to a paltry 148,616 as its endowment shrank to the lowest level since the museum’s founding nearly three decades ago.
Even the number of museum trustees had diminished when its board surprised the art world with what even David Johnson, a chairman of the museum’s board noted last week, was a risky choice to head the museum.
Photo: AFP
“Jeffrey was way, way, way out there as a candidate,” he said.
The risk in hiring an established risk-taker was a calculated one, said Eli Broad, the billionaire collector and arts patron whose US$30 million challenge grant to the museum in 2008 helped save the faltering institution.
“We wanted someone who was, call it what you want, a game-changer,” Broad said by phone before the opening of Art in the Streets, Deitch’s first full-scale show. What the board sought during a worldwide search, added Broad, was someone who was, frankly, “an impresario.” What it got in Deitch was an unorthodox choice and yet a canny one, an owlish 58-year-old with a Harvard MBA, a background in finance, a former corporate art adviser and a person who, after shifting careers from finance and consulting to become a full-time art dealer, mounted shows like Session the Bowl, devoted to the culture of skateboarding, and installations like Black Acid Co-op, which recreated a burned-out methamphetamine laboratory, or Nest, in which two artists moved into his Grand Street gallery, first filling it with the shredded remains of numberless telephone books.
Photo: AFP
Deitch — trim, mild-mannered, a distance runner who favors custom-made suits from Caraceni and buffalo-horn eyeglasses he designed himself — gives little appearance of being the sort of person who might stage a dinner to celebrate the publication of a photographer’s new book and then invite the members of an all-male artist collective to entertain the 250 seated guests by clambering (wearing tuxedo jackets, stilettos and fishnets) across a wooden structure vaulting dinner table set with fine napery and silver candelabras and, once installed there, to urinate into one another’s bucket hats. Yet he is.
“It was spectacular, perverse, uplifting, beautifully horrifying and deeply transgressive,” Deitch said of that particular evening, in a New Yorker profile. It was also, like many of Deitch’s seeming transgressions, professionally well judged.
Among the unlikely seeming reasons that the Museum of Contemporary Arts board bypassed more-conventionally trained museum professionals for a man sometimes termed an heir to P.T. Barnum, Broad suggested, was his involvement in the Art Parade, an annual procession through downtown Manhattan in which the Dazzle Dancers and motley locals disport themselves in mainly Spandex and glitter.
Photo: AFP
If, as Andy Warhol used to say, business art is the best art, the best business art in a town like this one may be the show business kind. Deitch is an avowed Warholian who considers obscure performance artists like the intellectual transvestite Vaginal Davis a celebrity, and celebrities like Kim Kardashian artists manques.
From the pool terrace of the 743m2 house that Deitch rents in the hills near Griffith Park (and that Cary Grant is said to have shared with Randolph Scott), a postcard panorama takes in his new city: terraced movie-star gardens, downtown skyscrapers, the far-off Pacific wreathed in haze. Above Deitch’s bed hangs an abstract Aaron Young painting that, when stared at, produces an after-image of Christ; in a nearby hall is a preparatory sketch for Warhol’s painting Before and After.
“This is such an important, early, seminal work,” Deitch told a visitor one recent morning, referring to Warhol’s celebrated image, taken from a newspaper advertisement, depicting a woman before and after a nose job. It makes sense that, among the artworks Deitch has acquired, those he chose to show a guest depict a messianic prophet and radical metamorphosis.
“We want to set the agenda” for the coming decade, Johnson, the museum co-chairman, had said, referring to the museum.
That agenda became more plausible with the appointment last year of Deitch, following that of Michael Govan, the former director of the DIA Foundation, to head the Los Angeles County Museum; and of Ann Philbin, the well-regarded director of the Drawing Center, to run the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The arrival of this troika, a seemingly unbeatable combination, and the decision of prominent New York galleries like Gagosian and Matthew Marks to establish outposts in Los Angeles (Marks’ gallery will open next winter), did much to bolster Broad’s grand assertion that “Los Angeles could become the contemporary art capital of the world.”
If Deitch shares Broad’s ambitions, it’s in a played-down manner that can seem oddly like an asset in a town where hyperbole is the norm and personalities are often as bloated as floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
“We’re acculturated to the fusion of media now,” and equally to the decades-old institutionalization of high/low aesthetics, Deitch said one day last week over lunch at the down-home Urth Caffe, his hangout, where patrons bus their own trays. “Art, film, fashion, music are all going on and interacting simultaneously,” he added. “And LA is very receptive to that fusion.”
Critics of Deitch, and there are many, hold their noses at his apparent indifference to art-world hierarchies, equating his appointment with the death of civilization.
“The supreme opportunist,” Jed Perl, art critic for The New Republic, wrote of him in a critique that stopped just short of accusing Deitch of running a shop for art-trend knickknacks.
Some, like the blogger who attributed a series of moronic remarks to Deitch on Twitter, under the handle @FakeDeitch, see him as a carpetbagger. Some, on the evidence of stealth videos that made the rounds for a time, view him as an art-world Fuhrer, a heavy-handed censor who, shortly before Art in the Streets was set to open, ordered a graffiti mural by the Italian artist Blu painted over because its content, rows of coffins draped in dollar bills, was too political.
“That killed me,” said Deitch of the controversy surrounding his decision to blot out Blu’s mural, a move he explained was made necessary by the mural’s position facing a memorial commemorating Japanese-American soldiers who fell during World War II.
None of this mattered to the crowds lined up outside the Geffen Center in Little Tokyo last Saturday, not the censorship or the future of museums or the tendency among many in the art world to scour each minor occurrence for meaning, the way ancient divines did the entrails of birds.
They had come to see Neck Face, the graffiti artist whose installation — a menacing alley replete with flashing lights and the artist as a filth-covered hobo — was inspired, he explained, not by such obvious forerunners as the artist Mike Kelley but by his family’s unofficial trade constructing haunted houses. They’d come for the gloomy, wall-covering murals of inverted dead mammals by the Belgian graffiti artist ROA and the candy-colored cartoon ones by graffiti elders like Kenny Scharf and Futura 2000, nee Leonard McGurr.
They’d come for the gorgeously calligraphic markings by Retna; the demented funhouse installations by the Brazilian twins Os Gemeos; the wall of faux naive placards by the late Margaret Kilgallen; the “period” spaces recreated or taken intact from such shrines to the graffiti movement as the Fun Gallery or the black-lighted TriBeCa loft long inhabited by the graffiti legend Rammellzee.
This list barely begins to cover the extent of an outlaw artistic movement in Art in the Streets, which tracks the great graffiti dispersion from styles first created in New York by Lee Quinones, Dondi, Futura 2000 and others and that soon enough made it to Philadelphia, Chicago, the West Coast and the world.
The Los Angeles Times termed Art in the Streets a “bombastic, near-overwhelming cavalcade of eye-candy,” a crowd-teasing pull-quote if ever there was one. And while it’s too early to know how the exhibition will fare with critics, there is little reason to doubt Broad’s assertion that it will likely pull the crowds in and engage a new public, most particularly “audiences that would not otherwise go to museums.”
But the greater challenge faced by Deitch and others in the field is not luring new audiences accustomed to consuming media in blended form as much as it is attracting those who consume most media on hand-held tablets back into a brick-and-mortar temples to art. Will he be able to draw Angelenos off the freeways and the often gritty streets with even grittier and dystopic-Disney versions of American lives as conjured in a raunchy, immersive installation titled Street?
Will the decision to make his directorial mark with an ephemeral and often outlaw art form pay off for Deitch and the museum? Is Art in the Streets his signature gesture, his tag?
“We have to be very careful here to keep things rigorous and not pollute” the underlying mission of institutions like MOCA to uphold the highest standards of culture, Deitch said. “But at the same time, the art world has a tendency to academicism and aridity. I’m very interested in seeing that art remains connected to emotion. I’m a very optimistic person and it’s important to me that the museum conveys that optimism to people, that the art we show stays connected to life.”
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50